Full Description
This dazzling debut announces a not-so-new voice: that of the spoken-word poet Tjawangwa Dema. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Dema's collection, The Careless Seamstress, evokes the national and the subjective while reemphasizing that what is personal is always political.
The girls and women in these poems are not mere objects; they speak, labor, and gaze back, with difficulty and consequence. The tropes are familiar, but in their animation they question and move in unexpected ways. The female body-as a daughter, wife, worker, cultural mutineer-moves continually across this collection, fetching water, harvesting corn, raising children, sewing, migrating, and spurning designations.
Sewing is rendered subversive, the unsayable is weft into speech and those who are perhaps invisible in life reclaim their voice and leave evidence of their selves. As a consequence the body is rarely posed-it bleeds and scars; it ages; it resists and warns. The female gaze and subsequent voices suggest a different value system that grapples with the gendering of both physical and emotional labor, often through what is done, even and especially when this goes unnoticed or unappreciated.
A body of work that examines the nature of power and resistance, The Careless Seamstress shows both startling clarity of purpose and capaciousness of theme. Using gender and labor as their point of departure, these poems are indebted to Dema's relationship to language, intertextuality, and narrative. It is both assured and inquiring, a quietly complex skein that takes advantage of poetry's capacity for the polyphonic.
Contents
Foreword, by Kwame Dawes
Acknowledgments
The Elegy of the Half-Done Quilt
Apoptosis
Red
Geography
Atropos
Taxonomy
The Borderlands
Ventriloquist
Ellen West
Mothering
Vesta
Nostalgia
The Careless Seamstress
The Three-Body Problem
Lent
Not No Body
Women Like You
Dreams
Ovaria
Before the Wedding
Lethe
Mutineer
You Who Have Forgotten
Just Because
At the Last Sound
Winter Tortoise
Domboshaba
Self-Portrait with a Missing Tongue
A Benediction for Climbing Boys
Shibboleth
Sea
The Parable of the Tree
Mama
In the House of Mourning
Fetching
Batting
Mourning at Night
First Algebra
The Other
Stole (Chain of Sorrow)
Lares
Fish Camp
Naomi
White Noise
On Saying There Is No God
Homonym
Notes
